Although his neck was still badly sprained, there was no malfunction of his central nervous system. Even if Barbara hadn't been a thousand times more enchanting than Betty, this second demonstration of his body inspiring affection in a grown woman—Barbara was twenty-three, and had "vaguely" lived with men before her marriages—understandably "provoked an even firmer reaction than the first. As Barbara murmured and caressed, an area of sheet rose between his belly and knees, like a low, local tent. Since its stubby upright alone was a source of ecstasy, he could not find a word for the pleasure it afforded under Barbara's ministrations.
Yet the dreamy nurse's busy hands and mouth seemed detached from her romantic aura, as Bach was separate from his glorious cantatas. "Oh yes, I've noticed that," she said one afternoon when, while mechanically smoothing the sheet, her palm bumped the upright. "My poor darling. And your hands all dressed."
She opened the door wider to any approaching footsteps in the corridor. Joe quivered with thoughts of her intention and of discovery's terrible peril. "Don't be embarrassed," she said, pulling the sheet one way and his gauzy hospital gown the other. She fondled his testicles, occasionally drawing her hand up the pole like an archer pulling his bow. She moistened him with saliva, sustaining the rhythm. Joe supposed he would faint. He tried to control his panting: even before his recent inactivity, he
116^ MOSCOW FAREWELL
had been short of breath. ReHef came quickly. In the setting of the spare but friendly hospital, the afterglow was indescribably delicious and bizarre. He searched for something to say.
"I want to thank you," he mumbled, touching her hair with the tips of his bandages.
"It's such a pressure for a bedridden person to live with," she answered blandly. "They taught us a little about massages."
The following morning, the therapy was repeated. Then it was Barbara's day off, and she decided not to provoke the inevitable suspicions by appearing. The next day she relieved him twice, which would be average for the coming week. Each finger was like a machined piston ring; together they moved up and down him as if he were as long as an arm. Her mouth encircled him wholesomely, as if puckering for a Life Savers ad. He came like a whale blowing. She cleaned up, stood up, smiled.
When she took him to the bath, she washed his parts twice, first and last. Weak in the knees and unable to grip the railing through his bandages, he was supported by one of Barbara's hands in the small of his back, while the other laid on the soapy strokes. Masturbation was exultation!
Barbara now went directly to it with no exchange of words. It was understood that the silence was to help avoid detection: Joe's room surely had KGB "ears." This inhibition also made them accept that intercourse was impossible. With Joe's neck, she would have to mount him, and would require too long to get down if there was an alarming sound in the corridor. The one time he reached his forearm inside her long uniform skirt, she was moist but hesitant.
"Not here. Soon you will be well again." She went to her other duties and Joe sniffed the heat-heightened genital scent lingering on his skin.
But Barbara's disinclination to talk seemed to derive too from the dispassionateness of her attendance: the same professionalism, or whatever, that prompted her immediate attention to his erection whenever she entered the room alone, and her unhurried yet undallying relief of it. In any case, the only sounds were Radio Tashkent in the patients' common room one floor below and a medicine trolley's occasional squish over linoleum. The muteness of the room itself during these breathtaking acts
imparted a dreamlike aesthetic obscenity to Joe's pleasure, which the fear of exposure heightened still further. Venery was ecstasy!
In contrast to Barbara, Joe beheld the sex as integral to something larger; the artistry of her hands intensified his worship for the whole of her. Ever since reading A Farewell to Arms, he'd had a fantasy of being wounded in a daring enterprise—the crash served perfectly well—and being nursed (true, on some cooler shore, with November sun and wistfulness) by a Grace Kelly in whites. Whereas beautiful girls had no reason to give him a chance in ordinary circumstances, the extended contact of recuperation would allow the woman of his reveries to truly know him. He and Barbara were following this scenario faithfully. His lust was only the icing, or confirmation, of a heavenly relationship whose coincidental elements were stronger even than the fancifuclass="underline" how many lived to see so many elements of their sexy-angel fantasy come true? As if the two substances were trying to fuse permanently the interlocking of dream and reality, the old-fashioned starch of Barbara's uniform smelled much like his semen, which she swallowed to avoid staining the towel.
Still severely sprained, his neck was now in a cast. There were a thousand things to worry about, beginning with being held incommunicado these twenty-three days. His doctors seemed capable, but the Tashkent officials clearly hadn't informed the Embassy in Moscow, despite all promises. They were probably investigating him furiously to determine his connection to the crash. His whole Central Asian trip would be the subject of some Colonel's report about motivation and likelihood of espionage. Meanwhile, no one in the world who had known him before could guess his whereabouts. His Armenian student friends, waiting with their abortive banquets, no doubt presumed he'd been arrested and were planning how to downplay their friendship. His own family, to whom his letters were surely not getting through, might think him dead or be hoping for a miracle like Hemingway's after his African crash. (A Farewell to Arms was constantly on his mind. The hospital librarian brought him a copy and he read the Russian translation with infinitely more enjoyment than he had the American original.)
But his only real worries were the heat and fear of discovery. Nothing else mattered: not the boredom nor the food (they made
special efforts for him); surely not the American Embassy. In this haven from pressures and neuroses, he began to realize he was a grown man, mature enough to accept Barbara's attention to his manhood and her respectful devotion. Only she could have done this for him.
Only she too could have made him think of disappointing his mother's most important expectation of him: to marry a nice Armenian girl. He ruminated and sweated, trying to weigh the apples of his upbringing against the oranges of this tumultuous love, all the harder to measure because of the suspected microphone and Barbara's untalkativeness. For example, he couldn't determine whether she was quiet-dumb or quiet-intelligent. But in the end, he was relieved of the decision. The romance terminated with much less originality than it had begun.
When he was well enough to walk for exercise, Barbara vanished from the hospital. Like Pavel, she might not have existed.
Joe had to be careful when asking about her, even though he felt more ill than after the crash. That the other nurses claimed to know nothing about her disappearance increased his dread. And indeed: the man "from the city soviet committee" who had continued visiting him after the others dropped off appeared in his room after three tormenting Barbara-less days. In tones of hurt, anger and menace, he accused Joe of violating Soviet hospitality and the "honor of young Soviet womanhood."
He handed him a piece of notepaper. On it was Barbara's confession, ostensibly to the hospital directorate. "I cringe when I think of what I have done to myself and to the reputation of Soviet women. I am tortured by thoughts of my violation of the People's trust. I sold everything I'd been given in life—all Soviet society's material support and moral development—for a foreigner's glad-rag promises. Oh why did I do this humiliating thing to me and my Motherland? Defile the sacred name of Nurse, even spoil hospital sheets with my vileness? These questions will haunt me the rest of my life. . . . I beg that my career not be ruined nor behavior publicized in the press. Please allow me to return to Tashkent and, in the spirit of Soviet humanitarianism, atone for